Justice Denied

made more progress with Scott than I have with Kelly. Still, I’ve done my level best, and I thought we were doing fine. The previous weekend, when Mel and I had been down in Ashland, she and Kelly seemed to get along fine-at least fine as far as I could see. I remembered Kelly even teasing Mel about whether or not we were going to get married. Now Kelly uttered the word her in regard to Mel with such vivid contempt that it caught me by surprise. Between Sunday morning and Tuesday afternoon, what could possibly have changed?

“I just talked to Mel,” Kelly continued. “She told me we’ll be staying at Homewood Suites and gave me the confirmation number.”

I still didn’t get it. My first thought was that since Kelly and Jeremy live on a very tight budget, maybe she was worried about having to pay a hotel bill.

“I’m paying for the room,” I said, trying to fight my way out of a mess not of my own making. “You don’t have to be concerned about that.”

“This has nothing to do with money!” Kelly exclaimed, her voice trembling with outrage. She seemed on the verge of tears. “It’s bad enough that we have to come all the way from Ashland to Seattle with a month-old baby in the car. Is it asking too much to expect that we’d get to spend some time with you instead of being carted off to a hotel like a bunch of strangers?”

Let it be said that Mel and I had just finished squandering the better part of three reasonably pleasant days in my daughter’s company. On the face of it, her sudden antipathy made very little sense.

“Scott and Cherisse will be staying there, too,” I offered lamely. “And it’s only a couple of blocks from here.”

From Kelly’s point of view the hotel could have been on Pluto. “It’s all about Mel, isn’t it,” she raved on. “Mel this and Mel that. She’s shacked up with you there and has you completely under her thumb. Mel’s doing this because she doesn’t want to share you with anyone, not even with your granddaughter, who’s crazy about you, by the way!”

By now this amounted to the most bizarre conversation I’d ever had with my daughter-in terms of turning tables, that is. Because the truth of the matter was, having my children come stay at Belltown Terrace with Mel and me when we were obviously living in sin was a big deal-in my book, anyway. And I suspected it was in Mel’s, too. Of course I could have pointed out that Kelly and Jeremy hadn’t exactly tied the knot in a timely fashion. In actual fact, Kayla’s birthday predates her parents’ wedding anniversary by several months.

People say that there’s nothing worse than a reformed drunk, and the situation here was probably similar. Maybe now that Kelly had finished sowing her wild oats, she wanted her father to shape up and do the same. It occurred to me that Kelly’s great-grandmother, Beverly Jenssen, had been of the same opinion. DNA will out.

On the other hand, I wasn’t about to send Mel packing back to her apartment in Bellevue for the duration of the kids’ visit, either.

“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” I said soothingly. “I won’t be going in to work. We’ll be able to spend plenty of time together.”

“We will not!” Kelly insisted. With that, she hung up on me. I didn’t call her back. There wasn’t much point.

Mel came home a little while later. She whipped out of her work clothes, put on a jogging suit and sneakers, and dragged me with her down to the running track.

Belltown Terrace is one of the few buildings in Seattle actually constructed under an interesting, short-lived, and amazingly complicated set of residential/mixed-use zoning rules. The bottom five stories are office building. The sixth floor-including the rooftop of the office building-is a common recreation area for the taller residential structure. It includes a party room, a swimming pool and hot tub, an exercise room, as well as a sport court. Much of the outdoor rooftop area is devoted to gardens, which Mel tells me include an award-winning collection of hydrangeas. (Since I know zero about flowers and/or gardens, I more or less have to take her word for this.)

A rubber-mat-covered running track runs the full perimeter of the sixth floor-about a quarter of a mile in all. When the building was first built, this running track was supposed to be a big selling point, and maybe it still is, but what looks and sounds good on paper sometimes misses the mark when it comes to actual delivery.

What the architects and planners had failed to take into consideration was the wind-tunnel effect from nearby high-rise buildings. Even in the dead of summer you can be out on the Belltown Terrace running track with a chill gale blowing into your teeth. Since this was March and a long way from the dead of summer, it was downright frigid out there.

I’ve often said that my major form of exercise is jumping to conclusions. Mel had set out to change that. At least three times a week she dragged me, usually kicking and screaming, down to the running track, where she literally ran circles around me while I walked. (All knees are not created equal.)

Afterward, sitting in the hot tub, she leveled a blue-eyed stare in my direction.

“What’s wrong?” she said. “You’re a million miles away. Are you thinking about Beverly?”

I was sad about losing Beverly, but what was really bothering me right then was the fact that Mel’s good deed of making hotel reservations for Kelly and Scott was about to blow up in both our faces. I knew I’d have to tell Mel about the situation with Kelly eventually, but not right then. I nodded and sighed as convincingly as I could manage.

“It is sad,” Mel agreed. “Especially for Lars. Widowers often don’t fare too well when they’re left on their own.”

Which gave me something else to worry about entirely.

“How was your afternoon?” I asked in an attempt to change the subject.

Mel frowned. “More interesting than it should have been,” she said. “I started tracking down locations on those released sex offenders. I just barely scratched the surface, but already two of them are dead.”

“Dead?” I asked.

Mel nodded. “One suicide and one accident. It’s too bad I didn’t know about this over the weekend. We could have stopped off in Roseburg on the way coming or going and made some inquiries. Feet on the ground instead of phoners.”

“What’s in Roseburg?”

“Outside of Roseburg, actually,” she said. “A guy named Les Fordham got sent to prison for molesting his girlfriend’s twelve-year-old daughter. When he got out he went to live in southern Oregon. That’s where he was from originally. Got a job working in a sawmill there and seemed to be doing all right. Then, last summer, for no apparent reason he turned on the gas on his stove and ended up blowing himself to kingdom come. Started a mini forest fire in the process. Fortunately it rained like hell the next day, and the fire didn’t turn into a major one.”

“And the accident?” I asked.

“You may remember it,” Mel said. “The guy’s name was Ed Chrisman. He was living up in Bellingham. Got all drunked-up on a Sunday afternoon last December. The investigators theorized that he stopped off at one of the rest areas on Chuckanut Drive to take a leak. It was cold, so he left the car running while he got out to do his business…”

“I remember,” I said. “He also left his car in gear. It hit him from behind while he was standing there with his fly unzipped. Knocked him off the edge of a cliff into the water. The car went into the drink right along with him-on top of him, as I recall. Smashed him flat.”

Mel nodded. “That’s the one. Nobody bothered to report him missing until several days later. With the weather the way it was, his vehicle wasn’t found at the foot of the cliff until almost a week after it happened. The transmission was still in gear when they fished it out of the water.”

“Sounds like he was still in gear, too,” I said.

I admit, it was a tasteless joke-but dying with your pants unzipped is a tasteless joke. Mel glared at me. “Not funny,” she said.

“No,” I agreed. “I suppose not. But if those two guys were already dead, how come they’re still on Ross’s sex-offender list?”

“I believe that’s why Ross has me updating the list.”

“Right,” I said. “Makes sense to me. Sounds like me and missing persons. Now let’s go see about dinner.”